Daily Archives: 26 March 2012

Warmer indoors, but still cold on the streets: Sex workers' demonstration in Ottawa, January 2012

Partial but major victory today in Canada’s sex-work court case. The full decision is here, and a description of the case here. From the Globe and Mailon today’s ruling:

Ontario’s top court has legalized brothels and will allow prostitutes to have security and other staff that is specifically aimed at protecting prostitutes.

In a landmark decision Monday, the court said that prostitution is extremely dangerous work where inherent risks are multiplied by laws preventing prostitutes from working together under one roof or hiring security staff. As of April 25, they can engage bodyguards or security staff.

In addition to striking down the law against brothels, the court modified a law criminalizing pimping, so that “it will remain illegal to live off the avails of prostitution, but only ‘in circumstances of exploitation.’” But:

The court left intact just one of three key provisions that had been challenged by three current or former prostitutes. It said that communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution will remain illegal. Yet, even that provision narrowly escaped being struck down.

In the court’s only point of disagreement, Mr. Justice James MacPherson and Madam Justice Eleanore Cronk argued that the communication law is unacceptable because it forces street prostitutes to hurriedly negotiate with customers without first being able to size them up.

The refusal of the three other judges to strike down the communication law will likely go a long way to still the fears of politicians and residents who worried about an influx of prostitutes overtly propositioning prospective clients in the streets. …

Activists at a Toronto organization known as Maggie’s: Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, said the judges seriously erred by leaving street prostitutes unprotected, eking out a highly-dangerous existence on the extreme margins of society.

“The vast majority of all prostitution arrests are under the communication law,” said Emily Van Der Muelen, an assistant professor in Ryerson University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. “The failure to strike down the communication law means that the most vulnerable sex workers will continue to face arrest, police harassment, prosecution and violence.” …

The three judges acknowledged that the law may prevent prostitutes from being able to size up potentially dangerous customers before jumping into their cars. However, they reasoned that, with indoor prostitution now being made legal, there will be strong incentives for outdoor prostitutes to move into homes or brothels.

The Court, ominously, did not altogether discard the idea that eliminating prostitution was a legitimate public purpose, noted Carissima Mathen, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. The judges simply found that the existing laws were not a means to that end. They

rejected arguments that the prostitution laws were linked by a common goal of eradicating prostitution itself. .. [They] agreed today that the provisions under attack were not truly aimed by legislators at eradicating prostitution, as government lawyer[s] had argued in the appeal.

Rather, they said the purposes of the provisions were to eliminate some of the undesirable social consequences of sex work – neighbourhood disruptions and the exploitation of vulnerable women by pimps.

According to Mathen, “The Court also said that [the objective of eliminating prostitution] could be valid; it just wasn’t borne out by the evidence here … This leaves some room for Parliament to come back with a new law that does have that purpose.”

Nonetheless, Valerie Scott, legal coordinator of Sex Professionals of Canada, told reporters: “I feel like a debutante. I feel like a citizen.”

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget — I kept saying — that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago –
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

Like this:

A friend from Iran sent me this link tonight; it’s amusing, in a disturbed and disturbing sort of way. The “Iran Firewall Test” allows you to “use the Internet in Iran in real time” to explore what people in the country can access or not through ordinary Web means. What’s blocked, and what’s not? Enter your favorite website, and see.

This little blog is unblocked, at the moment, a dubious honor; if you want anything read in Iran, just let me know and I’ll facilitate it. One feels like reciting Brecht’s poem:

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth ? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you:
Burn me!

The Economist wonders what’s the cinematic model for Mitt Romney’s shifting, unstable selfhood. Is his campaign really a subtle work of art beneath the sales pitches, “a meditation on the nature of identity and memory”?

Is the man like Jason Bourne: waking with amnesia to find that somebody else has decided who he is, and he’s on the lam from the sinister identity imposed on him? Did the CIA train Mitt Romney as a cold, superefficient liberal assassin, and is he just trying to fight his way back to the nice, normal, Midwestern Tea Partier he was before they got their claws in him?

Or is he like Leonard Shelby in Memento, his long-term memory completely shot, no continuity in his life beyond the ten-minute mark, forced to tattoo reminders on his body of who he actually is and what he’s striving for? How many people have ever seen Mitt without his shirt on?

Whatever the solution, the British magazine finds something quintessential to these shores in Mitt’s constant recalibration of his soul. It’s as if he’s an avatar of

the American equation of freedom with the possibility of reinventing oneself. These big, chiselled men with their blue suits, asserting their right to invent themselves as exactly whoever the public wants them to be right now: where have we seen them before? They’ve been with us since the birth of the modern American moment. Jay Gatsby. Roger O. Thornhill. (Eva Marie-Saint: “What’s the O stand for?” Cary Grant: “Nothing. I made it up.”) Most recently, of course, Don Draper.

I can buy that. But there’s one movie precedent they left out: another Matt Damon role, the talented Mr. Ripley, a bounder who knows perfectly well who he is, but wills, and kills, to turn into something else. I can easily see Romney inviting Pat Robertson out for a boat ride in the sunny bay, then shoving him overboard and taking on his identity to preach the Sunday sermon, if Mitt thought it would help him get the God vote. Maybe it’s already happened — heard from Pat lately? They even look alike.